FELLOWSHIP  BOOKS 

Stratton 


CHILDHOOD 


COPYRIGHT    1913 

BY  E.  P.  BUTTON  &  CO. 


CHILDHOOD 


/1De/u>fift&  C&ffCamoTurfas  new-Gom  ffteses, 


PrtttecCuntfi.  softies  cf  fas  mothers  kisses, 
vYfm  ban,  it  upon,  famjrom  fUsfat&fs  &&& 


I.    TOYS 

EVEN  when  we  are  about  buying  for  a 
child  the  pretty  toy,  one  thing  we  al- 
ways say — "And  yet  children  love  their 
ugly  old  toys  best."  It  is  not  true,  however, 
that  children  love  ugly  toys ;  they  like  homely 
toys,  toys  that  can  be  clasped  very  close;  and 
though  homely  does  mean  ugly,  in  the  Ameri- 
can and  the  obsolete  English  languages  (be- 
cause we  would  hurt  a  word  rather  than  our 
ugly  fellow-creatures'  feelings) ,  yet  what  chil- 
dren like  in  homeliness  is  precisely  homeliness, 
something  not  too  bright  or  good.  Ugliness 
is  dreadful  to  a  child,  especially  at  first  sight. 
He  may  learn  to  love  it  in  a  dear  parent  or 


^3  dear 

2021CKO 


dear  nurse,  as  the  little  boy  evidently  loves  the 
bottle-nosed  man  in  Ghirlandajo's  delightful 
picture,  but  ugliness  in  a  stranger  is,  in  the 
strict  sense,  frightful.  We  are  imposing  our 
own  sense  of  humour  on  children  (as  usual), 
and  in  its  most  ignoble  form,  when  we  give 
them  grotesque  toys.  And  as  for  guys,  where- 
by we  invert  the  natural  veneration  of  images, 
the  Fifth  of  November  is  a  date  which — for 
the  sake  of  Sylvia — we  all  dread. 
<%  When  Sylvia  was  three,  she  wept  and 
shuddered  great  part  of  a  day,  and  some  part 
of  a  night,  because  a  guy  had  suddenly  faced 
her  on  the  pavement.  Now  she  is  four  she 
cons  the  difficult  task  of  assuring  herself 
"They  are  boys,  they  are  only  little  boys." 
You  may  watch  through  her  delicate  face 
the  horrible  misgiving,  the  resolute  reply, 
succeeding  each  other  in  that  innocent,  fal- 
tering breast.  She  says  little  of  her  fear,  but 
gently  leads  the  talk  that  way;  and,  when  she 
is  told  that  the  boy-guys  have  each  received 
a  penny,  her  dear  effort  is  to  establish  a 

2 


human  relation  with  them  in  her  thoughts. 
"Pennies  for  them  to  buy  nice  sweets,"  she 
says  to  herself.  There  is  the  thing  in  common 
with  her  own  beauty  and  tenderness  and  her 
little  appetites :  sweets,  then  boys — not  devils. 
^fe  But  if  we  wrong  our  children  by  the 
grotesque  we  do  so  more  commonly  by  the 
gift  of  the  worthless  toy,  a  thing  that  will 
not  last.  The  doll  is  perhaps  as  significant 
as  the  statue,  the  gargoyle,  the  coin ;  it  is  gen- 
erally worse  than  even  the  statue.  The 
manufactured  image  of  mankind  given  to  our 
little  girls  to  play  with  is  not  only  ill-designed, 
but  so  fragile  as  to  cause  more  weeping  than 
joy.  The  doll  of  commerce  is  very  heartlessly 
made  so  that  she  often  goes  to  pieces  on  the 
very  day  of  presentation.  Her  brief  arm 
comes  off  first;  it  had  been  ineffectually  glued 
on.  Piecemeal  she  comes  apart.  She  does 
not  preserve  such  poor  individuality  as  she 
had,  long  enough  to  get  a  name.  She  is  never 
named,  never  grows  old,  never  gets  the  love 
of  habit,  never  ratifies  the  rapture  of  posses- 
3  <%  sion, 


sion,  never  justifies  the  first  kiss.  A  little 
time — at  the  best  it  is  not  long — is  all  that  we 
of  larger  than  doll's  growth  have  for  that  rati- 
fication and  for  that  proof.  Well,  it  is  hardly 
moral  that  the  child  and  the  doll  should  kiss 
but  for  an  hour. 

$s  Why,  the  personality  of  an  honest  doll 
ought  to  outlast  her  head — nay,  several  (re- 
sembling) heads.  It  was  so  with  the  dolls  of 
an  elder  day  and  a  simpler  country.  When 
one  head  was  unfortunately  walked  upon,  the 
old  cook  took  the  trunk  and  the  pieces  into 
the  town,  and  matched  the  type  of  beauty 
— he  was  very  grave  and  intent,  without  con- 
descension, over  the  business.  The  face  was 
renewed,  but  the  name  and  the  affection  held 
on  with  a  persistence  that  was  almost  worthy 
of  party  politics. 

%  There  have  been  charming  toys  in  litera- 
ture, but  none  much  dearer  to  the  reader  of 
good  will  than  the  little  horse  which  Esther 
Summerson  gave  to  Peepy  after  one  of  his 
misfortunes — Esther,  contemned  by  the 
4 


readers  who  think  to  crush  Dickens  by  one 
word,  "Sentimentality"  (albeit  this  is  an  emo- 
tion that  would  be  good  for  the  majority,  and 
the  majority  includes  those  critics),  and  by 
another  word,  "Caricature"  (caricature  being 
nevertheless  a  most  admirable  art).  Dickens, 
of  all  the  greater  masters  of  our  national  Let- 
ters, has  the  most  perfect  memory  of  child- 
hood. Not  by  his  strangely  over-praised 
"little  Nell"  is  this  proved,  nor  by  any  but 
certain  brief  passages  of  Paul  Dombey,  but  in 
his  much  less  famous  children,  and  in  the  little 
fists  of  these  are  toys. 

II.    THE  STRANGER'S  CHILDREN 

*fe  "Do  you  bite  your  thumb  at  us,  Sir?"  "I 
do  bite  my  thumb,  Sir"  "Do  you  bite  your 
thumb  at  us,  Sir?"  "No,  Sir,  I  do  not  bite 
my  thumb  at  you.  Sir;  but  I  bite  my  thumb, 
Sir." 

«fe  ACROSS  the  "backy-garden,"  at  the  rear 

of  the  house  where  the  Children  dwelt — the 

child  of  tumult,  his  luminous  little  dark  sis- 

5  «fcter, 


ter,  and  the  somewhat  older  ones — and  over 
the  young  poplars  from  George  Meredith's 
garden,  ran  a  small  street  with  shops  and  lodg- 
ings. It  was  very  full  of  children,  and  some- 
times they  leant  so  far  out  of  the  upper  win- 
dows that  the  question  arose  in  the  Children's 
home,  Would  a  neighbourly  present  of  nur- 
sery window-bars  be  received  with  little  or 
with  much  contempt,  or  perhaps  declined,  and 
if  so  with  offended  feelings  or  without?  The 
Children  themselves  did  not  encourage  the 
project.  The  children  at  the  back  were  very 
proud,  they  said.  And  how  did  they  show 
the  passion?  it  was  asked.  "Well,  mother, 
they  come  to  the  window,  and  black  their 
boots  at  us." 

<%  Of  all  the  many  surprises  of  childish  re- 
plies, this  was  not  the  least.  It  was  given  in 
great  gravity  and  good  faith.  To  these  young 
observers  the  action  of  their  opposite  neigh- 
bours admitted  no  other  interpretation,  albeit 
there  had  been  no  exchange  of  covert  verbal 
defiances,  such  as,  "Do  you  black  your  boots 
6 


at  us?"  "We  "do  black  our  boots."  "Do  you 
black  your  boots  at  us?"  "We  do  not  black 
our  boots  at  you;  but  we  black  our  boots." 
The  demonstration  was  not  of  battle,  as  "I  will 
frown  as  I  pass  by,  and  let  them  take  it  as  they 
list" — but  of  sole,  sufficient  pride,  silent,  de- 
tached, lifted  between  heaven  and  earth,  at 
the  second-floor  windows  of  its  appropriate 
street.  It  was  not  for  a  mere  grown-up  per- 
son to  introduce  doubts,  or  to  suggest  how  far 
from  the  usual  manifestations  of  pride,  how 
different  from  its  customary  pomps,  is  the 
symbolism  of  blacking  and  of  boots.  No 
doubt  the  children  were  right,  and  declined 
our  symbolism  on  their  own  good  authority. 
^  Their  conclusion  as  to  the  boots  had  prob- 
ably its  own  obscure  justification,  and  was  not 
due  to  unworthy  suspiciousness,  for  the  Chil- 
dren were  disposed  to  friendliness,  and  would 
have  inclined  rather  to  a  lenient  than  to  a 
severe  interpretation  of  the  act  of  demonstra- 
tive blacking,  had  there  been  room  for  doubt. 
At  a  taller  and  quite  remote  row  of  windows 
7  *fe  appeared 


appeared  the  heads  of  other  children,  of 
whom  Pride  seemed  to  have  made  no  victims. 
At  least  there  appeared  among  them  no  signs 
of  blacking.  With  these  the  more  usually  in- 
telligible language  of  toys  was  the  means  of 
communication.  At  long  range — so  long  that 
a  walking  duck  could  hardly  be  distinguished 
from  a  mechanical  alligator,  and  dolls  looked 
as  much  alike  as  the  heroines  of  a  year's  novels 
— toy  was  held  up  for  sympathetic  and  com- 
panionable rivalry  with  toy;  and  across  in- 
tervening roofs,  by  means  that  yet  remain  a 
mystery,  the  pet  names  of  both  batches  of  chil- 
dren had  been  announced  and  exchanged. 
Never  was  so  enterprising  and  prosperous  a 
friendship  on  facilities  so  slender.  The  de- 
lays, hesitations,  and  reserves  of  acquaintances 
begun  in  the  ordinary  ways,  in  houses,  in  Ken- 
sington Gardens,  or  otherwise  on  point-blank 
terms,  never  troubled  these  mutual  advances. 
Or  so  it  seemed.  But  with  some  surprise  the 
mother  of  the  Children,  walking  with  them, 
perceived  that  they  cast  looks  askance,  neither 
8 


wholly  strange  nor  in  any  wise  intimate,  at 
another  walking  group,  equally  lowering, 
gloomy  with  an  equal  kind  of  unavowed  in- 
telligence, and  with  an  equally  embarrassed 
mother.  The  children  of  Pride,  walking  in 
the  street  perhaps  with  those  very  boots  new- 
blacked,  could  hardly  have  been  watched  with 
more  sombre  or  more  cloudy  eyes.  Afraid  lest 
her  young  ones  should  have  committed  the 
grosslerete  of  making  enemies,  the  mother  of 
the  Children  asked  them,  in  their  unwonted 
silence,  who  it  was  that  they  seemed  to  be  cut- 
ting. With  surprise  she  then  heard  that  these 
strangers,  seen  at  full  length,  were  they  whose 
distant  eager  heads  were  invested  with  so  much 
childish  friendship  in  the  windows  under  the 
skies.  Within  an  hour  or  so  after  that  un- 
friendly encounter,  with  its  shadowy  strange- 
ness and  vigilance  of  eyes,  all  was  restored  at 
the  high  back-windows,  and  a  London  sunset 
showed  the  ambiguous  toys — new  ones,  just 
bought  in  the  course  of  that  walk  estranged — 
the  signalling  hands,  and  the  jostling  heads 
9  %  unequal 


unequal  of  height,  at  their  former  intercourse, 
candid,  clear,  familiar,  and  full  of  spirit  and 
drama. 

$fe  Distance  seemed  to  set  these  gallant  little 
creatures  free  from  some  of  the  disadvantages 
of  the  world  and  from  the  uneasiness  of 
crowds.  They  were  released  in  a  world 
barely  sprinkled  with  people  within  hail  of 
one  another,  glad  of  recognition,  and  made 
friends  by  intervening  space,  and  liberty  par- 
taken. 

*%  Perhaps  it  was  the  childish  solitude  that 
made  the  window-communication  so  clear. 
Almost  painful  to  the  writer  is  still  the  mem- 
ory of  introductions  in  childhood.  Ah,  to  be 
placed  in  front  of  three  little  natives  in  white 
embroidery,  and  bidden  to  talk  with  them  in 
Genoese,  or  in  any  human  tongue,  with  parents 
artificially  listening  in  compliment  to  the 
stranger's  children,  but  solicitous  for  their 
ownl  There  are  moments  that  are  literally 
difficult  to  live  through,  and  this  was  of  them. 
Solitude  and  a  garden  hedge  between,  or  some 
10 


such  other  slight  defence  and  distance,  and 
Genoese  no  doubt  would  have  flowed. 
S&  Nor  can  one  easily  forget  the  unexpressed 
misgivings  at  those  invitations  to  play  with 
the  stranger's  children  in  the  gardens  of  the 
Tuileries.  It  was  already  depressing  enough 
to  stand  on  a  counter  to  be  fitted,  and  to 
hear  the  modiste  tell  one's  mother  that  one 
ought  to  have  the  petit  jupon  bouffant  which 
one  had  not,  and  that  no  coat  could  have 
justice  without  it.  But  to  be  accosted,  under 
this  visible  disability,  by  the  children  of  Paris, 
little  girls  obviously  furnished  with  the  petit 
jupon  bouffant — this  was  the  cause  of  a  dumb 
shyness.  "Veux-tu  venir  jouer  avec  moi?" 
So  ran  the  invariable  invitation  of  the  charm- 
ing Parisians,  little  citizens  so  well  civilized  as 
to  need  no  defences,  no  barriers,  no  return  to 
the  space  and  the  distances  of  birds  in  search  of 
primitive  confidence,  or  to  the  rarity  of  angels 
in  quest  of  natural  courage.  The  English 
child  kept  in  the  after  years  of  life  the  sense 
of  national  defeat  that  attended  the  consent  to 
n  $s  that 


that  unequal  game.  If  Waterloo  was  won 
upon  the  playing-fields  of  Eton,  it  has  been 
many  times  avenged  on  the  playing-grounds 
of  the  garden  of  the  Tuileries. 
fife  Otherwise,  and  the  conditions  being  more 
free  and  more  nearly  equal,  to  play  with 
strangers,  to  play  internationally,  was  a  great 
delight.  The  game,  being  all  dramatic,  did 
away  with  any  need  for  close  knowledge  of 
the  actor.  Since  yonder  boy  was  a  spirited 
horse  of  uncertain  temper,  his  temper  as  a  boy 
was  of  small  importance.  There  was  no  need 
even  for  names  when  all  the  players  alike  were 
terra-cotta  pipkins  for  sale,  to  be  known  as 
sound  or  cracked  by  their  voices  under  a  blow. 
Quarrels  never  arose  in  these  encounters  of  an 
hour.  Our  playfellows  were  toys  of  the  live- 
liest animation,  but  without  so  much  percep- 
tible character  as  might  chance  to  ruffle  our 
own.  The  concert  of  Europe  was  undis- 
turbed. 

*%  One   only   remembrance   is   fraught  with 
some  self-reproach.     It  is  that  of  two  little 
12 


English  girls,  who  chose  to  frighten  all  the 
children  of  an  Italian  village  and  sweep  the 
hill  of  them.  It  was  done  without  malice,  but 
with  a  horrid  sense  of  dominance ;  and  without 
violence  except  that  of  mere  running.  The 
population — sad  to  remember — was  so  gentle 
that  its  full  number  of  children,  of  several  ages, 
were  thus  to  be  hunted  down  the  slopes  of  the 
chestnut-woods,  by  the  onset  of  a  couple  of 
capricious  foreign  girls.  But  so  it  was.  The 
day  was  a  festa,and  the  children, carrying  their 
shoes,  strolled  on  the  hill-side,  between  the  cy- 
presses and  the  belfries.  All  things  go  in  un- 
equal groups  on  such  an  afternoon — little  com- 
panies of  church-bell  tunes,  young  men  play- 
ing at  bowls,  no  one  alone.  The  village  chil- 
dren loitered  principally  about  the  steep  ave- 
nues to  the  church.  But  when  the  two  slen- 
der invaders  began  to  give  chase,  the  first 
group  scattered,  and  then  the  next,  perhaps  not 
knowing  how  little  formidable  were  the 
hunters;  then  a  third  broke,  a  fourth  wheeled. 
Young  Italians  do  not  run  without  clamour, 
13 


and  the  outcry  of  the  dismay  of  all  those 
children  seemed  the  wilder  that  the  two  pur- 
suers kept  their  breath  for  the  hunting.  One 
swept  the  wood,  another  charged  down  the 
narrow  road.  They  joined,  they  closed  upon 
the  quarry,  or  in  open  order  cut  off  the  escape 
of  scattered  fugitives.  Of  the  little  villagers 
there  was  not  found  one  to  resist,  or  so  much  as 
to  question  the  attack.  They  cried  out  to  each 
other,  pointing  the  probable  way  to  safety  as 
they  ran.  That  they  must  run  was  the  one 
thing  they  were  sure  of,  and  they  sped  over 
rough  and  smooth,  heads  down,  so  that  the 
heights  were  presently  clear  of  them,  and  their 
last  clamours  dropped  as  they  reached  the 
shelter  of  the  street,  like  the  cries  of  birds  that 
wheel  and  settle  after  an  alarm.  The  two  rep- 
resentatives of  the  predominant  races,  who  can- 
not have  measured  nine  feet  between  them,  sat 
down  in  the  conquered  district,  flushed  with 
success.  Alas! 


III.  CHILDREN'S  BOOKS  OF  THE 

PAST 

Yesterday  Rebecca  Mason, 
In  the  parlour  by  herself, 
Broke  the  handsome  china  basin 
Placed  upon  the  mantel-shelf. 
^  BY  a  kind  of  dreadful  punctuality  of 
rhythm  and  rhyme,  by  the  forethought  of  the 
surname  of  Rebecca,  by  the  unadorned  auster- 
ity of  the  anecdote,  the  reader  is  fairly  sub- 
dued. Here  is  the  "inevitable"  word  of 
which,  in  recent  literary  criticism,  we  heard  so 
much.  That  stanza  is  written  for  our  over- 
throw and  confusion.  It  is  as  though  a  sheep 
had  butted  us,  and  done  it  efficiently.  A 
mother  of  to-day  tested  on  her  modern  chil- 
dren the  verses — "Cautionary  Verses"  is  the 
appropriate  name  of  some  of  them — written 
by  the  Misses  Taylor  (Jane  and  Anne)  and  by 
Mrs.  Turner,  the  creator  of  Rebecca  Mason, 
for  the  children  of  the  earlier  part  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.  The  little  hearers  were  not 
much  more  than  bored.  It  was  prose  work 

15  ^3  of 


of  about  the  same  period,  and  animated  by 
the  same  spirit,  that  had  the  full  success  of 
irony.  Mrs.  Turner  had  as  it  were  fixed  us 
with  her  eye  and  challenged  us  to  think 
Rebecca  Mason's  name  to  be  artificially  pre- 
pared ;  she  brought  her  stanza  to  a  close  which 
left  the  reader  speechless.  But  Mrs.  Fenwick 
must  really  "abide  our  question."  Mrs.  Fen- 
wick  wrote  a  book  about  a  Bad  Family  and  a 
Good.  She  asks  us  to  believe  that  these  fam- 
ilies lived  in  the  same  town,  in  the  same  street, 
in  "handsome  houses"  of  equal  size,  and  that 
they  teemed  with  an  equal  brood  of  six  chil- 
dren— three  good  girls  and  three  good  boys, 
and  three  bad  girls  and  three  bad  boys.  There 
is  a  kind  of  heroic  symmetry  here  which  is  ill- 
suited  to  the  quality  of  Mrs.  Fenwick's  prose. 
Now,  young  children  love  to  hear  of  large 
families,  and  to  get  their  names  and  ages  per- 
cisely  right.  But  these  two  equal  batches  of 
six  caused  something  like  dismay;  and  when 
their  names  were  disclosed  the  spirit  of  deri- 
sion sprang  forth,  and  was  not  quenched  again. 
16 


^1  It  is  not  wise  to  tempt  too  much  that  spirit 
of  derision  in  children.  Burlesque  and  irony 
do  not  accord  with  the  simplicity  which  be- 
comes them.  But  there  is  derision  and  derision. 
In  this  case  it  was  fresh,  it  was  cordial,  it  was 
purely  humorous,  and  as  joyous  as  the  laugh 
of  running  races.  The  Bad  Family's  names — 
alliterative — gave  the  signal  for  the  first 
laugh:  Greedy  George  and  Selfish  Sarah; 
but  Manly  Edward  and  Well-bred  Charles  in 
the  Good  Family  were  hailed  with  candid  de- 
light. You  might  envy  Manly  Edward  his 
reception,  the  generous  laughter  of  a  little  girl 
of  eight  suddenly  confronted  with  his  mascu- 
line perfections ;  Well-bred  Charles  never  had 
in  his  own  day  of  a  hundred  years  ago,  from 
any  literal  reader,  the  welcome  he  had  from 
the  honest  irony  of  this  child.  Is  scorn  really 
joyous  in  the  heart  of  man  or  woman?  It  was 
as  joyous  as  ever  Tennyson  imagined  it  in  the 
humorous  heart  of  this  childish  listener:  in- 
nocent scorn,  liberal  scorn,  intelligent  scorn, 
simple  exhilaration  of  contempt.  For  really 
17  *&  studious 


studious  Arthur,  patient  Emma,  generous 
Susan  and  the  rest  deserved  to  be  thus  rejected 
with  the  most  cheerful  incredulity;  they  were 
intolerable. 

*%  But  perhaps  scorn  and  contempt  are  not  the 
just  words.  What  the  child  expresses  in  her 
loyal  laughter  is  derision  without  its  sneer;  a 
sally  of  cheerful  astonishment  at  the  book,  at 
the  children  who  took  it  seriously,  at  the 
authoress  who  administered  it.  It  is  in  fact 
neither  more  nor  less  than  good  laughter  at  bad 
art.  The  child  does  not  deride  the  virtues  at 
all;  the  manliness  of  Edward  and  the  good 
manners  of  Charles — so  far  as  those  qualities 
accorded  with  human  life — would  command 
her  respect  in  any  contemporary  child.  Hap- 
pily so,  for  the  sense  of  humour  is  by  no  means 
the  most  important  sense  in  a  young  child; 
credulity  is  better,  admiration  is  much  better, 
and  simplicity  is  still  much  better.  The  sense 
of  humour  would  be  dearly  gained  at  the  ex- 
pense of  these.  But  there  is  no  such  expense. 
The  habit  of  burlesque  and  irony  in  childhood 

18 


is  deplorable  and  unchildlike.  But  purely 
childlike  and  purely  natural  is  the  humour  that 
rejects  Mrs.  Fenwick's  families.  She  has 
what  she  merits,  and  even  if  the  quality  of  the 
hilarity  she  causes  now  were  questionable,  the 
fault  lies  with  her.  She  might  have  raised  a 
better  kind  of  laugh  while  she  was  yet  at  her 
authorship,  and  she  did  not. 
<%  And  if  she  refreshed  no  one  with  humour 
in  her  own  day,  did  she  fill  her  young  readers 
with  any  good  aspirations?  She  was  really 
too  dull  to  have  any  real  appreciation  of  the 
manliness  of  Edward  or  of  the  industry  of 
Arthur.  And  see  how  she  rewards  and  how 
she  avenges.  To  the  Good  Family  she  awards 
the  approval  of  the  street  in  which  the  two 
handsome  houses  were  situated.  The  Bad 
Family  she  punishes  with  the  ill  opinion  of 
the  same  neighbourhood.  Mrs.  Fenwick,  and 
Mrs.  Turner,  and  the  Misses  Taylor  were  very 
small  writers  in  their  day,  but  they  share  with 
two  great — most  diversely  great — writers  one 
certain  character.  They  have  as  little  spiri- 
19  ^Ituality 


tuality  as  Sir  Walter  Scott  and  Jane  Austen. 
And  children  are  not  without  a  sense  of  that 
defect  when  right  things  and  wrong  things, 
and  their  consequences,  are  the  matter  of  a 
story. 

IV.   CHILDREN'S   BOOKS  OF  THE 
PRESENT 

%  THE  idea  that  dragons  are  not  interesting 
characters  in  a  romance  for  grown-up  people 
is  a  modern  idea.  It  is  not  a  good  idea,  for  an 
interest  in  dragons  is  quite  as  easy,  and  at  least 
as  pleasing,  as  a  belief  in  some  of  the  characters 
in  contemporary  fiction.  That  adult  readers 
of  the  older  romance  were  on  easy  and  equal 
terms  with  dragons  is  clear  from  the  fact  that 
those  romances  were  written  not  for  children, 
but  for  their  elders.  Even  the  classic  and  un- 
dying fairy  stories — before  Hans  Christian 
Andersen — were  written  neither  about  chil- 
dren nor  for  them.  They  have  been  rather  left 
to  children  than  given  to  them.  The  grown- 
up dropped  them,  content  that  the  children 
20 


should  believe  (that  is,  rightly,  pretend  to  be- 
lieve) in  dragons,  though  we  ourselves  prefer 
to  pretend  to  believe  in  the  detestable  people  of 
the  annual  plays.  Therefore  we  shed  our  an- 
cient love-stories  and  the  children  pick  them 
up,  with  all  their  wizards,  witches,  transforma- 
tions, and  delights,  and  thrive  on  them.  One 
of  the  causes  of  their  good  fortune  is  that  they 
were  composed  without  condescension. 
%  But  the  condescension  of  the  new  story- 
book is  an  offence.  Some  of  our  annual 
authors  evidently  think  that  the  more  nonsense 
they  write  for  the  little  ones  the  better,  and  the 
more  "fancy"  the  author  displays  the  more 
flexible  will  he  seem  to  be  in  his  performance. 
What,  we  may  wonder,  if  we  cannot  remem- 
ber, does  the  young  child  think  of  the  flexibil- 
ity of  the  grown-up  who  perform?  I  think 
he  knows  all  about  that  grimace  and  the  value 
of  it.  Mrs.  Fenwick,  Mrs.  Turner,  and  the 
Misses  Taylor  were  at  any  rate  not  humorists. 
If  they  stimulate  the  sense  of  comedy  in  the 
child  of  our  times,  they  must  have  quelled  it 
21  *fe in 


in  the  child  of  their  own.  Whereas, of  some  of 
our  later  writers,  in  whose  eyes  Mrs.  Fen- 
wick  and  her  like  are  doubtless  nothing  but 
ridiculous,  it  is  to  be  feared  that  they  have  done 
worse  than  quell  the  sense  of  comedy  in  chil- 
dren ;  that  they  have  rather  made  it  weak  with 
the  tension  of  their  use;  they  have  "practised 
upon  it,"  as  used  to  be  said  of  unlawful  arts. 
They  have  worn  it  out  by  too  persistent  appeal. 
I  would  rather  have  trusted  to  the  recovery  of 
a  child's  comic  spirit  after  the  negative  opera- 
tion of  a  Mrs.  Fenwick — even  in  the  days 
when  she  was  taken  seriously — than  I  would 
hope  for  a  healthy  condition  after  a  course  of 
reading  among  the  newer  Christmas  story- 
books of  a  comic  character.  All  is  not  for 
self-congratulation  as  time  brings  its  revenges, 
fife  I  find,  in  nearly  all  the  little  books  of  the 
day,  the  repeated  and  repeated  stimulation  of 
the  spirit  of  fun  in  its  thinnest  shape;  and 
sometimes  there  is  to  be  perceived  the  author's 
courageous  hope  that  the  child  will  think 
better  of  the  fun  than  he  himself  has  succeeded 

22 


in  thinking,  when  all  is  done;  now  and  then 
the  flagging  heart  is  easily  to  be  detected,  and 
the  misgiving  that  the  wary  little  reader  may 
find  no  more  laughter  in  the  matter  than 
moved  the  writer  at  his  work  of  humorous  in- 
vention. 

^s  No  such  anxieties  beset  our  Mrs.  Fenwick. 
Her  readers  had  to  know  their  place.  She 
kept  the  upper  hand,  serenely.  She  had  no 
waverings,  not  she.  But  then  she  was  doing 
straightforward  work;  she  had  no  occasion  for 
secret  thoughts,  and  she  knew  none.  She 
made  no  appeal  to  the  chances  of  a  child's 
spirit;  she  curried  not  his  favour;  the  child 
had  to  take  what  was  given  him.  But  at  the 
end  of  the  account  perhaps  he  was  no  more  ill 
served.  If  the  elastic  childish  sense  of 
humour  should  fail  in  its  spring  and  buoyancy 
by  reason  of  so  much  straining  by  the  child's 
authors,  if  it  should  grow  lax  and  flaccid,  there 
would  be  much  loss  rather  than  gain  by  the 
work  of  a  century. 

<%  Indeed  the  reaction  againts  the  "Caution- 
23  ^ary 


ary  Stories"  of  1813  has  carried  the  modern 
author  far;  and  it  is  a  helpless  and  a  weak 
thing  to  be  carried  by  reactions.  In  all  the 
children's  books  of  a  season  you  shall  hardly 
find  one  "moral"  at  the  close.  Now  children 
with  erect  minds  like  a  moral.  And  the  worst 
thing  in  all  these  happenings  would  be — per- 
haps already  is  this:  that  a  child  of  to-day 
would  be  afraid  and  ashamed  to  own  that  he 
liked  a  moral ;  would  be  so  aware  of  the  light 
mind  in  his  father  and  mother  and  his  aunts — 
yes,  in  his  godfather  and  godmother — so  shy 
of  their  banter,  so  well-informed  as  to  their 
habitual  irony,  so  educated  in  paltriness  and 
burlesque,  that  he  would  not  confess  that  he 
likes  a  story  with  good  people  and  bad  in  it, 
a  story  with  free-will  in  it,  and  duty.  What  a 
misfortune!  A  little  honest  creature  covertly 
compelled  to  deny  the  little  simple  lord  of  his 
breast! 

%  Too  much  common  sense — and  too  com- 
mon— was  the  fault  of  a  hundred  years  ago. 
And  now  the  fault  is  too  much  common  non- 
24 


sense — and  far  too  common.  Since  we  began 
to  find  children  funny  we  seem  unable  to  think 
them  funny  enough.  Miss  Austen  did  not 
think  them  funny  at  all.  See  the  conscious 
Anne  Elliot  when  an  ungovernable  nephew 
had  her  by  the  neck  and  Captain  Wentworth 
disengaged  her.  Other  children  in  her  novels 
are  as  intolerable  as  those  in  Thackeray's. 
The  children  in  Charlotte  Bronte's  novels  are 
objects  of  her  sombre  dislike ;  of  anything  ex- 
cept natural  comedy.  But  even  in  our  altered 
times,  children  are  not  necessarily  farcical 
to  themselves.  They  would  not  always  be 
clowning. 

^Ss  Rossetti  was  harassed  by  the  word  "quaint" 
with  which  he  was  dogged.  If  modern  chil- 
dren had  a  sense  of  that  word  and  of  what  it 
implies,  and  were  fully  conscious  of  their  own 
dignity,  they  too  would  find  it  harassing. 
^  But  between  the  old  ways  and  the  new 
came  Robert  Louis  Stevenson,  some  of  whose 
delightful  verses  have  the  sententiousness  of 
Jane  and  Anne  Taylor  and  Mrs.  Fenwick, 
25  $fe  with 


with  the  important  addition  of  genius;  sen- 
tentiousness  with  an  equal  smile.  He  does 
not  clown,  he  makes  no  grimace,  but  looks 
steadily  and  intelligibly  into  the  child's  eyes. 

V.  FAIRIES 

Sfe  IT  is  for  fear  of  the  grown-ups,  or  at  least 
out  of  respect  towards  them,  that  a  chapter 
must  be  given  to  fairies.  If  the  children  do 
not  care  very  much  for  fairies,  they  must  be 
made  to  care.  "Who  is  to  care  if  they  do 
not?  Who  is  to  be  properly  childlike  if  they 
are  not?"  It  was,  accordingly,  an  illustrious 
grown-up  who  wrote  (I  am  quoting  Francis 
Thompson)  "Know  you  what  it  is  to  be  a 
child?"  Well,  we  all  should  know,  and 
we  are  generally  anxious  to  teach  one  another. 
The  poet  answers  for  us  most  eloquently,  "It 
is  to  be  so  little  that  the  elves  can  reach  to 
whisper  in  your  ear;  it  is  to  turn  pumpkins 
into  coaches,  and  mice  into  horses  ...  for 
each  child  has  its  fairy  godmother  in  its  own 
soul.  .  .  ."  And  previously  he  had  written, 
26 


"It  is  to  have  a  spirit  yet  streaming  from  the 
waters  of  baptism."  Were  elves  really  of  any 
importance  to  him?  We  must  take  his  word 
for  it,  even  though  we  may  make  a  slight  res- 
ervation because  we  know  that  even  a  great 
poet  has  some  regard  to  what  is  expected. 
But  another  great  poet,  who  never  paid  any 
attention  to  what  is  expected  from  him,  has 
told  us,  out  of  his  very  own  experience,  not 
what  childhood,  but  what  one  childhood,  was. 
To  Coventry  Patmore  it  was  a  time  rather  of 
divination  than  of  credulity.  His  "sweet 
childhood,"  he  names  it;  but  it  was  a  time  of 
secrets,  of  thoughts  wholly  unsuggested  by 
story-books,  unprompted  by  authors,  parents, 
uncles,  godmothers,  or  imaginative  adult  per- 
sons of  any  kind  of  officiousness.  It  is  certain 
that  he  did  not  think  elves  to  be  whispering 
in  his  ear.  But  he  contemplated  a  pebble  in 
the  gravel  of  a  garden  path  and  conceived  the 
thought  that  but  for  unrelaxing  pressure  it 
would  explode  into  dust.  Another  real  child 
— but  not  a  wonderful  child  like  Coventry 
27  fife  Patmore— 


Patmore — walking  on  grassy  garden  paths, 
was  a  little  troubled  to  think  how  many  living 
creatures  she  might  be  crushing;  and  how 
short  their  lives  were,  anyway.  But,  she 
thought,  as  the  size  and  space  differed  be- 
tween very  large  beings  (herself,  for  example) 
and  very  small,  so  might  time;  and  a  minute 
of  her  life  might  be  a  full  year  of  successions 
of  feelings  and  happenings  to  the  ant.  Six 
years  old  could  not  put  her  speculation  into 
appropriate  words  (a  task  which  might  tax 
sixty  years  old),  but  the  thought  was  very 
definite  to  her.  One  of  the  privileges  of  a 
child  is  that  he  is  very  near  the  earth;  he 
knows  moss  and  the  scudding  creatures  near 
it.  When  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes  found  the 
scent  of  a  little  box  hedge  to  be  suggestive 
of  eternity,  it  was  no  doubt  merely  sugges- 
tive of  time — the  incalculable  remote  time 
of  childhood,  which  stands  very  fairly  for 
eternity — because  he  had  smelt  it  when  he 
was  on  the  level  of  its  fresh  leaves.  So  Pat- 
more,  a  little  child  on  a  garden  path,  found 
28 


matter  for  close  thought.  Truth  interested 
him,  and  fiction  did  not.  In  later  years  he 
gave  himself  to  the  truth  of  science,  and  fi- 
nally to  the  truth  of  poetry.  Truth  was  to 
him  more  splendid  and  more  mysterious  than 
any  tale. 

fife  It  may  well  be  doubted  whether  children 
are  generally  credulous.  It  may  even  be 
doubted  whether  Francis  Thompson  believed 
in  his  own  elves  and  their  whispers — whether 
he  cared  for  possible  coaches  and  horses  as 
much  as  for  real  pumpkins  and  mice.  It  may 
be  that  those  elves  of  his  were,  in  his  wonder- 
ful boyhood,  nothing  other  than  symbols,  be- 
lieved in  with  interpretation. 
<%  For  children  do  not  believe  in  fairies  a 
jot.  I  have  just  asked  my  youngest  daughter 
whether  she  believed  in  them,  and  she  said 
"Of  course  not — only  I  liked  the  stories." 
Fiction  to  children  is  fiction  and  not  fact. 
They  are  artists  enough  for  that.  And  it  is 
strange  indeed  that  many  elders  have  so  for- 
gotten childhood  as  to  imagine  that  they  be- 
29  fife  lieved 


lieved  in  fairies,  if  they  honestly  do  imagine 
it.  What  dull  years  have  so  blurred  their 
past  that  they  are  willing  to  rehearse  the  sham 
memories  of  others?  A  belief  in  fairies  is  no 
child's  play.  Children  have  nothing  to  do 
with  it  except  as  in  some  countries  they  trem- 
ble behind  their  trembling  fathers.  It 
pleased  Ruskin — and  for  once  I  marvel  at  his 
pleasure — to  think  of  fairies  believed  to  be  so 
disorderly  in  the  woods  at  the  back  of  Joan  of 
Arc's  country  that  a  church  service  was  held 
in  the  forest  depths  once  a  year,  and  even  then 
they  were  not  quelled.  I  think  this  is  the  only 
false  passage  of  Ruskin — I  know  no  other.  A 
belief  in  fairies  is  a  terrible  and  an  adult 
thing,  a  horrible  heresy,  and  nothing  for  a 
tourist's  smiles.  It  was  the  cause  that  a 
woman,  in  remoter  Ireland,  believed  to  be 
not  herself  but  a  changeling  left  in  her  like- 
ness and  in  her  place  by  fairies,  was  burnt 
by  the  father,  husband,  and  sons  who  loved 
the  "lost"  one — not  many  years  ago.  This 
is  not  child's  play;  it  is  faith.  We  indeed  are 
30 


child's-playing  with  serious  things  and  with 
serious  words  when  we  ask  our  children  to 
say  they  believe  in  fairies.  Not  that  our  re- 
quest will  ever  make  them  believe;  they  are 
honest  people.  But  in  this  appeal  we  tamper 
with  the  word  "believe,"  and  palter  with  its 
sense.  The  pretty  game  of  calling  on  the 
children  of  the  audience  of  Peter  Pan  to  de- 
clare their  faith  in  fairies  seemed  to  me  dis- 
astrous— a  game  of  men  and  women  at  the 
expense  of  children,  a  cumbersome  frolic  at 
best  and  an  artificial,  a  tyrannous  use  of  the 
adult  sense  of  sentimental  humour  against  the 
helpless.  I  could  with  better  conscience  use 
my  superior  physical  strength  upon  them  than 
exploit  them  for  love  of  my  own  condescen- 
sion. (And  yet  Sir  J.  Barrie  has  written  the 
most  adorable  "pretending"  story  ever  writ- 
ten about  a  child.) 

%,  No,  children  love  a  fairy  story  not  because 
they  think  it  true,  but  because  they  think  it 
untrue,  and  because  it  makes  no  fraudulent 
appeal  to  their  excellent  good  sense.  That 
31  %  sense 


sense  they  are  delighted  to  put  aside  while 
they  "pretend."  That  is  their  own  word. 
Every  child  uses  it,  and  every  child  knows 
what  he  means  by  it.  "Let's  pretend,"  not 
"Let's  believe."  Their  mother  does  not  put 
"Let's  pretend"  into  the  child's  mouth;  she 
finds  it  there.  Without  it  there  is  no  play. 
But  the  pretending  is  always  drama  and  never 
deception  or  self-deception.  Nay,  the  more 
obvious  the  drama  the  better  the  child  likes 
it,  especially  when  he  is  quite  young  and  sim- 
ple. I  have  always  found  the  favourite  game 
of  hide-and-seek  to  be  that  in  which  there  is 
no  mystery  about  the  hiding-place.  The 
child  loves  best  to  know  the  cupboard  in  which 
his  mother  is  crouching;  if  he  fairly  sees  her 
into  it  so  much  the  better.  Then  does  he  pre- 
tend to  seek  her,  pretend  to  find  her;  then 
does  she  pretend  to  amaze  him  with  a  rush; 
then  does  he  pretend  to  be  overcome  with  the 
surprise  of  it.  This  game  never  tires.  Do 
not  tell  me  that  this  splendid  little  actor  is  a 
"realist."  Even  if  you  come  to  more  elabo- 
32 


rate  drama — his  pirates'  lair  behind  the  sofa, 
his  Indians  in  the  shrubbery,  if  he  deceived 
himself  the  whole  play  would  immediately 
go  out.  You  may  indeed  see  a  nervous  child 
deceived,  and  frightened,  by  a  mechanical 
toy.  The  mechanical  toy  is  a  silly  blunder 
of  the  grown-up.  The  child  sees  in  it  some 
ambiguous  life,  where  life  ought  not  to  be, 
and  cries.  There  is  no  more  fun  in  this  than 
in  the  Irish  peasant's  flames.  In  both  cases 
there  is  no  fair  pretending  but  faith  perverted. 

VI.  THE  INFLUENTIAL  CHILD 

%s  LOVE  is  not  a  mystery  in  Japan.  It 
would  not  have  been  a  mystery  in  Europe  if 
a  child — Dante — had  not  been  in  love.  For 
mystery,  religious  and  passionate  alike,  has 
its  source  and  sanction  in  the  heart  of  child- 
hood. In  like  manner  the  love  of  Nature — 
of  the  landscape  and  the  heavens — was  a  spir- 
itual mystery  in  the  boyish  hearts  of  Vaughan 
and  Traherne  (repeated  in  that  of  their  son 
and  brother  Wordsworth,  the  boy  whom  the 
33  %  cataract 


cataract  haunted  like  a  passion).  By  these 
boyhoods,  remembered  very  seriously  in  after- 
life, European  literature  has  been  converted 
to  two  mystical  passions  which,  century  by 
century,  are  its  very  life.  Without  those  boy- 
hoods these  two  loves  might  have  been  fer- 
vent, exalting,  poignant,  but  not  mysterious, 
not  spiritual  with  the  "golden  purity,"  the 
ignorant  spirituality  of  childhood. 
%  It  is  said  that  our  European  manner  of  ro- 
mantic love  (strictly  speaking  romantic)  is 
scandalous  to  the  Japanese.  They  can  have 
had  no  Dante.  And,  in  spite  of  their  pleasure 
in  blossoms — their  annual  popular  tryst  with 
cherry  and  chrysanthemum — it  is  doubtful 
whether  the  love  of  Nature  has  ever  taken  an 
illustrious  or  mysterious  form  with  these  little 
people.  Their  landscape  art  is  gay,  observ- 
ant, and  arbitrary ;  but  it  is — as  far  as  an  Oc- 
cidental student  can  interpret  it — not  passion- 
ate. For  landscape  that  proves  a  passion  for 
Nature  and  for  mystery — both  the  legacies 
of  man's  dead  childhood — we  must  look  to 
34 


the  great  painters  of  two  countries,  France 
and  England ;  to  Turner,  Wilson,  Crome,  and 
Corot,  and  thus  especially  to  the  country  that 
produced  the  boyhoods  of  Vaughan,  Tra- 
herne,  and  Wordsworth.  Many  a  child  of 
our  race  has  received  that  early  inspiration, 
and 'these  men  of  early  genius  not  only  re- 
ceived and  remembered  but  put  it  on  such 
record  as  to  make  it  thenceforward  a  part  of 
our  literature.  It  is  accepted,  it  is  orthodox, 
it  is  expected  of  our  poets.  And  this  ortho- 
doxy, due  to  these  great  men,  is  due  originally 
to  these  great  boys. 

®ts  But  for  them  these  wonders  of  childhood 
would  have  been  forgotten,  or  put  away  as 
childish  things,  by  sensitive  spirits  who  had 
likewise  experienced  them.  They  would  not, 
at  any  rate,  have  gained  this  high  literary 
honour  and  this  literary  authority.  As  it  is, 
we  are  not  ashamed  to  remember  what  mid- 
summer early  morning  was  to  us  at  nine  years 
old,  because  literature  gives  us  authority. 
The  Jight  to  our  adult  eyes  is  lovely  still,  but 
35  *the 


the  magic  of  its  quality  is  gone,  the  memory 
remaining,  or  the  memory  of  the  memory,  or 
perhaps  no  more  than  the  grace  of  knowing 
that  there  was  once  a  memory — 

Not  to  forget  that  I  forget. 
fifc  It  is  their  own  landscape,  their  own  hour, 
that  moves  children  not  to  words  but  to  emo- 
tions. Great  views,  I  think,  give  them  a 
more  ordinary  and  grown-up  pleasure;  they 
do  not  love  formal  gardens,  even  Italian  for- 
mal gardens;  and  on  this  point  certainly  the 
child  is  not  the  father  of  the  man.  But  hill- 
sides in  wild  flower,  calm  summer  seas,  and 
those  aspects  and  phases  of  landscape  to  which 
Tennyson  gave  his  perfect  word  in  return  for 
a  perfect  emotion — these  are  wonderful  to 
children.  When  Tennyson  is  restored,  after 
the  indiscriminate  honour  and  the  indiscrimi- 
nate disesteem  that  have  befallen  him,  to  his 
own  place,  it  will  be  because  his  sense  of 
landscape,  his  sense  of  light  and  of  sun,  is  like 
a  child's. 

Sfc  As  to  Dante's  love,  the  presence  of  an 
36 


adult  sentiment  in  a  boy's  heart — one  should 
rather  say  in  his  soul  and  in  the  topmost 
places  of  his  soul — is  a  heavenly  incident  of 
human  history  and  therefore  may  be  subject 
to  the  worst  parody.  I  find,  for  example,  an 
exceeding  vulgarity  in  the  coquetting  of  boys 
and  girls  in  certain  kinds  of  American  stories. 
It  is  not  a  corruption  of  things  innocent  to 
evil;  but  it  is  the  corruption  of  an  extreme 
and  lofty  wisdom,  and  that  corruption,  I 
think,  is  silly. 

fife  Let  us  place  next  to  Dante's  sacred  love 
for  a  child  the  love  of  a  man  not  sacred  but 
profane — a  man  in  fiction  as  the  great  genius 
of  Emily  Bronte  conceived  him.  Heath- 
cliff's  tempestuous  love  for  Catherine  re- 
mains throughout  the  horrible  story  a  child's 
fresh  love,  even  though  Heathcliff  is  worse 
than  a  man.  And,  albeit  Catherine  dies  a 
woman,  it  is  to  her  childish  ghost  that  he  cries 
out  of  that  window  on  the  heights  before  his 
own  death;  the  ghost  of  a  child,  and  she  has 
been  long  a  dead  woman,  and  he  is  old. 

37 


VII.  FISHER  CHILDREN  IN 

FRANCE 

Sfe  WITHIN  a  walk  of  industrial  Boulogne 
is  the  little  village  without  hotels  or  a  "sea- 
son," left  altogether  to  the  fisher  families. 
fife  The  propriety  of  the  little  boy  of  these 
fishermen  is  so  great  that  when  he  bathes — 
on  Sundays — having  no  gear  for  that  occasion, 
he  does  not  enter  the  sea  unless  encumbered 
by  an  apron  of  his  mother's,  secured  round  his 
neck.  Nor  does  he  set  his  feet  into  the  first 
shallow  ripple  until  he  shall  have  crossed 
himself  with  the  sea-water.  In  his  own  bays, 
apart,  on  his  own  sands  untrodden  by 
strangers  and  out  of  view,  should  you  follow 
this  coast  of  Boulogne  towards  the  south,  you 
may  surprise  him  fulfilling  thus  his  modest 
rites. 

fife  Nothing  was  ever  more  uncentralized  than 
the  fishing  village  of  the  Pas  de  Calais. 
Except  that  Paris  eats  its  fish,  and  that  there- 
fore from  Paris  must  filter  down  a  little  nar- 
row gain — how  narrow  when  it  reaches  the 

38 


hand  that  set  the  sail  and  drew  the  net,  one 
must  gather  from  the  poverty  of  these  clam- 
bering streets — the  village  is  separate,  and 
there  is  no  cord  of  communication.  Does 
music,  for  example,  travel  these  few  miles, 
this  longer  distance  made  by  the  bad  roads, 
the  smell  of  fish,  and  the  incommunicable 
poverty?  The  boys  here  do  not  sing  the 
tunes  that  run  in  cities.  Does  the  press  cross 
the  boundaries  that  close  that  village  to  the 
world?  A  woman,  trim  and  talkative,  walks 
over  from  Boulogne  in  the  morning  with  so 
few  newspapers  that  if  the  vigour  of  her  race 
should  fail  her  for  once,  and  she  should  take 
the  little  diligence,  her  profits  would  be  gone 
at  a  blow.  There  is  indeed  that  barrier  to 
literature — a  dialect  that  has  to  be  reckoned 
with.  That  dialect  is  mixed  with  old  and 
alienated  English;  surely  not  because  of  the 
small  intercourse  with  our  sailors  when  the 
fishermen  go  to  Boulogne,  but  perhaps  by 
reason  of  old  colonizing  of  a  coast  which,  in 
our  aggressive  days,  we  not  only  conquered 
39  ft  but 


but  inhabited.  Those  colonists  were,  it  is 
true,  so  dealt  with  by  the  plague  that  not 
many  of  them  remained  to  improve  the  height 
and  diminish  the  pelvic  breadth  of  these 
French  people;  but  language  is  of  more  sub- 
tle penetration  than  the  influences  that  com- 
mand the  body;  it  prevails  and  clings,  per- 
sists, outlives,  and  wears  the  local  accent 
rather  than  die. 

£fe  The  way  from  Boulogne  lies  through  the 
quarter  devoted  to  the  factories — the  usines 
that  call  the  regiment  of  very  young  girls, 
marching  in  rows,  companies  of  friends  ten 
strong,  linked  by  the  arm,  daily  to  thirteen 
hours'  labour.  The  streets  of  this  industrial 
quarter  of  Boulogne  are  old,  well-built,  high- 
roofed,  shuttered,  full  of  character;  but  the 
factory-smoke  hangs  about  them,  and  be- 
tween this  road  and  that  lie  those  damaged 
lands,  neither  free  nor  captive,  subject  to  ac- 
cidents of  country  and  borough,  that  have 
everywhere  been  laid  out  by  the  hand  that 
broke  down  the  walls  of  cities.  And  then, 
40 


as  you  climb  the  hill,  and  turn  from  the  fac- 
tory to  the  road  leading  stumblingly  to  the 
fishing-village,  you  are  compelled  to  know 
that  the  refuse  of  a  fishing-village  is  fish. 
^  Everywhere  is  woman — thick-set  woman, 
warmly  clad  and  with  well-drawn-up  stock- 
ings— evident  and  active  out  of  doors.  But 
on  Sunday  only  is  the  fisherwoman  to  be  seen 
with  her  baby  out  in  the  sea  air.  Where,  one 
wonders,  does  the  baby  abide  all  the  week  by 
day  (he  has  a  clean  little  home  by  night  with 
a  religious  picture  over  his  neat  bed)  whilst 
his  mother  is  bent  under  the  burdens,  or  strid- 
ing on  the  errands,  or  pushing  the  carts,  or 
hauling  the  ropes,  of  the  labour  of  the  little 
port?  She  is  too  much  and  too  continually 
bent,  strained,  and  striving.  She  is  cloudily, 
though  not  stormily,  grave,  so  that  after  one 
has  seen  her  for  six  days  earning  so  violently 
her  bare  bread,  it  is  almost  a  surprise  to  find 
her  long-captive  and  long-diverted  smile  set 
free  on  Sunday  for  her  child.  She  suns  him, 
sitting  on  a  stone  in  front  of  her  own  momen- 
41  ^  tous 


tous  and  perpetual  sea;  and  after  this  brief 
play  he  disappears  again  from  the  light  of 
sea  and  sun.  The  older  children  have  their 
reunited  Sunday  also.  You  may  find  on  the 
grassy  cliff  two  families  and  one  pack  of 
cards;  two  fathers,  two  mothers,  and  all  the 
children  at  a  game. 

VIII.  INTERNATIONAL 

%  SOME  years  ago  a  Paris  paper  opened  a 
fund  for  the  supply  of  the  diphtheria  anti- 
toxin. Public  subscriptions  are  not  so  popu- 
lar in  France  as  they  are  here,  but  this 
prospered.  To  its  success  went  much  of  the 
national  love  of  children.  Many  of  the  sub- 
scribers sent  their  alms  in  memory  of  chil- 
dren lost,  and  took  an  obscure  pleasure  in 
making  their  grief  half-public.  They  would 
not  put  into  print  the  intimate  name  of  the 
child  they  had  lost,  but  neither  could  they 
keep  it  altogether  to  themselves.  Thus  they 
gave  the  initials.  And  when  their  offering 
was  made  in  the  name  of  the  bebe  attendu 


they  gave  their  own  initials.  They  satisfied 
one  hardly  knows  what  desire  to  proclaim,  a 
desire  that  has  no  care  whom  the  proclama- 
tion may  reach,  or  how  vaguely.  Poor  Grief! 
Francis  Thompson  says  she  is  not  beautiful; 
she  is  unfortunately  often  silly.  It  is  by  some 
such  instinct  that  certain  women  are  moved 
to  tell  one  another  their  affairs  without  much 
reference  to  the  act  of  listening,  as  in  Mr. 
Pett  Ridge's  stories.  Le  besoin  de  parler  de 
sol,  even  though  restrained  within  the  limits 
of  initials,  betrays  women  into  confidences 
without  a  confidant. 

%  Yes,  the  French  love  their  children,  and 
by  some  good  luck  in  their  tenderness  they 
have  not  vulgarized  them  by  bad  art.  Medi- 
ocrity and  bad  art  have  been,  and  are,  as  wide- 
spread in  France  as  in  England.  What  else, 
indeed,  should  mediocrity  be  but  widespread, 
anywhere?  But  it  has  never  made  a  topic  of 
the  children.  There  are  annually  pictures  of 
a  First  Communion  at  the  Salon,  but  they  are 
among  the  better  in  a  mixed  company. 
43  ^3  As 


*fe  As  to  the  United  States,  it  is  surely  time 
that  we  heard  something  newer  and  truer 
about  American  children  than  popular  fiction 
has  told  us.  The  tourist,  especially  the 
French  tourist,  is  entirely  occupied  with  the 
women.  One  might  gather,  from  the  letters 
written  by  M.  Bourget,  for  example,  that 
there  are  few  men  in  America,  and  that  there 
are  no  children  to  speak  of.  Mr.  Henry 
James  gave  us  the  boy  in  Daisy  Miller,  and 
there  was  the  little  girl  with  long  legs  who 
used  to  go  into  Dickens's  apartment  at  an  hotel 
and  look  at  him.  But  there  are  no  children 
in  the  later  little  books,  the  village  stories  we 
have  all  liked  so  much.  A  baby  may  be  in- 
troduced for  the  sake  of  grown-up  emotions 
— generally  those  of  one  of  the  spinsters  so 
common  in  this  little  fiction ;  but  of  the  child 
for  child's  sake  there  is  nothing. 
^  Now  what  I  saw  of  American  children  was 
quite  different  from  what  is  thought  to  be 
true  of  them  by  English  people  at  home. 
They  were  very,  and  very  unexpectedly, 

44 


childlike;  there  seemed  to  be  some  resolve  to 
keep  them  so  in  their  language;  a  child  was 
not  to  say  that  the  faces  in  a  picture  were 
"sad,"  but  only  that  they  "looked  sorry." 
The  children,  however,  were  one  and  all 
trained  to  be  sweetly  courteous;  it  was  not 
held  that  roughness  was  childlike.  They  had 
lovely  considerate  ways,  and  were  readily  af- 
fectionate. 

<%  Their  fault,  if  it  is  a  fault,  was  indeed  that 
they  were  warmly  inclined  to  an  eager  and 
easy  love  of  strangers.  This,  however,  is  so 
frequent  in  charming  children  that  any  mother 
who  is  habitually  prepared  for  the  sentiment 
of  a  heartache  may  find  all  the  heartache  she 
expects,  when  a  child  runs  to  the  stranger 
with  the  words  of  love  over  which  she  herself 
is  apt  to  brood  fondly  every  time  that  they 
come  her  way.  Nevertheless  this  welcome  to 
strangers  is  a  fresh  and  generous  thing  in  chil- 
dren, and  in  those  who  are  not  children. 
There  is  an  impulse,  at  once  natural  and  civil- 
ized, to  meet  new  faces  with  a  new  greeting. 
45  %  And 


%  And  in  America  are  the  little  negro  and 
negroid  boys  and  girls  with  their  sharp  eyes 
and  tiny  upright  braids  of  hair,  and  their  ex- 
traordinary democracy  and  self-possession;  a 
something  more  than  equality  where  you  fool- 
ishly looked  for  some  deference  from  the  ne- 
gro and  some  further  deference  from  the 
child  of  eight  years  old.  They  learn  their 
free  composure  from  their  frank  fathers. 
One  of  that  friendly  race  was  a  conductor  in 
a  train.  As  we  crossed  another  train  on  the 
prairie,  he  was  waving  delighted  hands,  and 
trying  to  make  his  shout  heard  in  the  uproar. 
And  then  he  turned  a  beaming  face  to  two 
English  stranger  ladies  with  whom  he  had  ex- 
changed no  previous  word.  "That,"  he  said, 
"was  my  brother-in-law." 

IX.  INJUSTICE 

<fe  CHILDREN  have  a  fastidiousness  that 
time  is  slow  to  cure.  It  is  to  be  wondered, 
for  example,  whether  if  the  elderly  were  half 
as  hungry  as  children  are  they  would  yet  find 


so  many  things  at  table  to  be  detestable.  It 
is  this  childish  dislike  of  many  foods  and 
drinks  that  makes  the  once  general  rule  of 
thwarting  the  tastes  of  children  somewhat 
cruel  and  more  than  a  little  unsalutary.  For 
the  omnivorous  parent  some  discipline  of  this 
kind  might  not  be  amiss;  but  for  a  critical 
and  discriminating  child  it  was  tyranny. 
Charles  Dickens,  to  whom  four  or  five  gen- 
erations of  children  have  owed  a  quite  in- 
calculable debt,  shows  us  Pip  at  the 
breakfast-table  of  Mr.  Pumblechook.  Dick- 
ens remembered,  or  imagined  perfectly,  the 
thoughts  hidden  in  a  child's  heart  at  the  sight 
of  the  meal  of  an  elderly  gourmand  who  asks 
questions  in  arithmetic  between  his  mouthfuls 
while  the  child,  on  a  very  ascetic  diet,  has  to 
guess  the  answers.  Dickens  was  so  dramatic 
that  he  could  not  see  the  sombre  children  of 
discipline  observing  while  the  grown-up  peo- 
ple ate,  without  thinking  their  thoughts;  he 
comes  to  the  rescue  of  the  desperate  insuffi- 
ciency of  their  own  expression. 
47  «fe  Not 


8fe  Not  only  once,  or  twice,  does  he  make 
their  stature,  their  protest  and  their  lowering 
little  vigilance  his  own.  He  knew  what  the 
deprived  child  thought  of  him  and  of  the 
other  guests,  and  he  was  the  only  guest  who 
cared.  That  no  one  else  seemed  to  have  any 
sensitiveness  as  to  the  daily  incident  of  those 
times  says  much  for  the  robust  unconscious- 
ness of  the  old,  and  is  really  wonderful.  How 
was  it  that  people  who  cared  at  all  for  any 
opinion  should  care  nothing  for  the  opinion 
of  children  because  it  was  disguised  in  the 
manners  they  were  compelled  to  wear? 
Burns  cared  somewhat  for  the  ill-opinion  of 
a  field-mouse. 

*fc  What  an  insensibility,  too,  to  the  after- 
judgments,  to  the  memories  put  away  for  the 
future!  Ruskin  has  a  certain  unavowed  pride 
in  his  early  hardships,  seems  to  admire  his 
mother  for  depriving  him  of  toys,  and  for 
making  him  peel  the  walnuts  (of  which  he 
might  never  eat)  for  his  father's  portly  guests. 
Well,  as  to  health,  walnuts  for  the  elderly  who 


had  just  dined  must  needs  be  worse  than  wal- 
nuts for  the  child  who  had  dined  long  before. 
But  if  Ruskin,  remaining,  in  his  greatness,  so 
much  the  boy  of  his  mother,  the  son  of  his 
father,  even  the  child  of  his  nurse,  in  his  life- 
long duty  to  them,  respected  their  adminis- 
tration, there  is  another  author  who  some  years 
ago  delighted  to  write  of  himself  chiefly  owing 
to  rancour  against  his  aunts,  long  dead.  Mr. 
Hare  was  a  child  of  that  unjust  time.  Many 
scores  of  later  wrongs  must  have  been,  we 
must  hope,  forgiven  by  him  during  all  the 
years  in  which  he  remembered  the  oppressors 
of  his  early  years.  That  he  was  really  op- 
pressed he  has  left  us  no  room  to  doubt;  his 
uncles  and  aunts  have  not  been  permitted  to 
rest  in  the  world's  oblivion — he  has  made  a 
close  record  of  their  tyrannies.  But  he  does 
not  seize  the  heart  of  the  matter  as  Dickens 
seizes  it,  reading  in  the  urchin  hearts  of  the 
children  of  his  friends.  Neither  Victor 
Hugo  nor  George  Eliot  has  written  quite  like 
Dickens,  from  within  the  boundaries  of  a 
49  ^3  child's 


child's  nature,  from  a  child's  stage  of  prog- 
ress, and  without  the  preoccupation  and  atti- 
tude of  older  experience. 
^  That  children  have  to  be  taught  self-de- 
nial is  a  truth  that  the  self-indulgent  youth, 
middle-age,  and  old-age  now  alive,  and  having 
children  in  charge,  would  blush  to  publish. 
Example  is  a  good  way  to  teach  them.  Our 
immediate  forefathers  did  not  teach  that  way, 
if  we  may  judge  from  these  records.  They 
seem  to  have  taught  that  self-denial  was  good 
for  the  innocent  but  not  for  the  more  or  less 
guilty.  Let  us  suppose  then  that  they  rea- 
soned in  this  comfortable  way:  "Children 
have  a  keen  pleasure  in  life — among  other 
things  a  perpetual  appetite."  Here  is  the  in- 
justice, for  children  have  a  thousand  distastes ; 
things  are  tedious  to  them.  We  have  no 
right  to  attribute  to  them  a  belief  in  fairies 
or  an  unwearied  delight  in  bread  and  milk, 
things  which  ate  alien  to  their  simple  hearts. 
We  have  now  learnt  that  the  children  should 
have  many  and  various  pleasures;  and  we 
50 


shall  perhaps  give  them  their  own  when  we 
no  longer  grasp  so  many  kinds  of  delights 
for  ourselves,  and  when  we  thus  gradually 
reverse  the  older  order  and  correct  the 
newer. 

fife  If  the  French  share  their  days  and  their 
dinners — perhaps  their  too  abundant  dinners 
too  abundantly — with  their  children  more 
than  we  do  even  yet,  they  have  this  in  their 
favour — that  no  French  Mr.  Hare  has  so  dealt 
with  his  aunts,  or  has  had  so  much  unsalutary 
trouble,  brought  about  with  infinite  pains  and 
deliberation,  to  outgrow  and  outlive  as  a 
memory  the  better  things  of  life. 
%  Saint  Monica  did  not  impose  all  the  fast- 
ing on  the  little  Saint  Augustine.  She  took 
her  share,  and  more. 

X.  NEAR  THE  GROUND 

Sfc  WE  lose,  by  mere  growing,  something  of 
the  good  habit  of  familiarity  with  the  old  and 
fresh  earth — the  familiarity,  especially,  of 
the  eyes  and  hands — that  is  the  child's  amends 
51  ^for 


for  his  neglect  of  the  sky.  We  hold  our  heads 
up — or  we  should  do  so — and  lift  our  eyes  to 
the  horizon,  and  upwards  from  it,  and  to  the 
tops  of  steeples  and  towers ;  but  a  child  hardly 
looks  up  at  all,  or  no  higher  than  his  father's 
face.  It  seems  that  many  a  grazing  and  la- 
bouring animal  feeds  through  its  last  long 
day  and  draws  its  last  load  without  having 
ever  looked  aloft.  Some  kinds  lift  their 
heads  a  little  when  they  utter  calls  or  cries, 
but  those  are  moments  of  preoccupation,  and 
their  attention  is  not  in  their  eyes. 
*fe  The  eyes  of  a  child,  if  not  so  long  and  so 
unconsciously  bent  away  as  the  animals'  from 
the  sources  of  light  and  darkness  and  of  the 
rains,  are  still  so  little  interested  in  the  heights 
as  to  need  the  rising  of  a  bird  to  show  them 
the  way  cloudward.  The  bird  leaves  a 
branch  shaken,  and  the  hurry  of  the  leaves 
makes  a  child  look,  and,  before  he  is  aware 
that  his  eyes  have  taken  flight,  they  are  cap- 
tured by  the  lark  into  that  unwonted  liberty, 
and  beguiled  into  the  manumission  of  blue 
52 


sky.  The  child's  sight  hardly  rises  but  as  an 
arrow  following  the  bird. 
fife  Otherwise  the  little  gaze  of  those  untrav- 
elled  eyes  is  busy  at  close  quarters  with  their 
own  matters.  It  is  not  in  vain  that  the  senses 
of  children  in  their  simplicity  are  familiar 
with  delicate  shows  and  scents.  While  we 
walk,  breathing  at  the  levels  of  lilac-trees  and 
hawthorn,  they  have  to  breathe  the  fresh  and 
strange  odour  of  moss  in  the  woods.  Nor  is 
there  a  breath  of  the  breathing  undergrowth 
that  does  not  find  its  way  to  the  spirit  of  a 
child,  to  create  memories  there.  Either  those 
wild  and  most  homely  scents  that  are  close  to 
the  ground  have  in  themselves  more  signif- 
icance than  have  all  the  richer  sweets  that 
blossom  breast-high,  or  else  it  is  their  direct 
communication  with  childhood  that  makes 
them  magical.  A  child  without  a  sense  of  the 
earth  would  miss  as  much  as  a  child — if  one 
could  be — without  a  sense  of  the  past. 
fife  Children  poring  over  the  ground  make 
friends  of  a  thousand  little  creatures  that  the 
53  fife  elders 


elders  have  long  ago  forgotten.  The  child 
knows  the  spiritual-rustic  scent  of  small 
daisies,  though  probably  a  great  number  of 
grown-up  people  have  not  been  for  many  con- 
secutive springs  at  the  trouble  of  smelling  a 
quite  small  wild  daisy;  one  poet  has  had  so 
short  a  memory  as  to  call  the  daisies  "smell- 
less";  and  so  with  other  kinds  of  growth. 
There  are  ways  of  the  clinging  of  ivy,  many- 
footed,  to  be  known  only  on  the  terms  of  child- 
hood, and  so  with  the  little  animals  that  find 
their  way  in  the  green  twilight  of  blades  of 
grass.  Their  fortunes  are  watched  by  chil- 
dren, who  are  so  near  them,  and  who  would — 
if  they  might  but  know  something  of  the  work 
in  hand — think  themselves  happy  to  use  their 
superior  strength  and  larger  outlook  in  help- 
ing the  industries  of  little  ants  and  beetles. 
This  may  never  be;  the  errands  of  the  hurry 
of  insects  are  not  to  be  shared.  And  even  in 
his  consciousness  of  greater  size  and  all  other 
human  conditions,  the  child  is  aware  of  his 
own  one  disproportionate  disadvantage — he 
54 


knows  well  that  the  ants  and  beetles  are 
grown  up.  Only  in  the  business  of  feeding 
he  finds  that  he  can  come  to  an  understanding 
with  all  kinds,  or  nearly  all  kinds,  of  small 
animals,  and  be  useful. 

*fe  He  finds  a  city  of  ants  most  pleasantly  re- 
sponsive; there  are  no  mistakes  or  misappre- 
hensions. Dear  were  the  ants  in  a  wide  stone 
loggia  long  ago,  where  they  came  up  through 
the  cracks  to  take  their  crumbs  in  the  sunshine, 
until  Benedetta  swept  them  with  a  besom  of 
destruction,  and  said  in  reply  to  the  weeping 
(and,  too  probably,  the  fists)  of  the  children 
that  the  ants  were  not  Christians.  The  little 
ants — the  little  grown-up  ants,  who  had  some- 
thing of  our  respect  for  aunts,  and  among 
whom  we  perceived  differences  of  size  and  of 
manners — were  involved  in  indiscriminate 
slaughter,  like  soldiers. 

%  It  is  at  close  quarters,  near  the  ground  of 
gardens  and  fields,  that  children  learn  to  know 
the  countries,  the  counties,  the  north,  the 
south,  the  orient,  and  the  Occident.  The 
55  %  country 


country  that  children  pore  over  is  surely  the 
country  of  memories  for  which  men  after- 
wards die.  For  this,  rather  than  for  any  dis- 
tant plains,  or  valleys,  or  even  mountains  (for 
which  armies  have  been  said  to  be  most  will- 
ing to  take  the  field) .  The  country  that  sent 
the  breath  and  spirit  of  its  earth  into  the  little 
nostrils  of  children,  that  was  known  in  tiny  de- 
tail, that  was  known  in  that  low  region  of  the 
earthy  air  through  which  the  elders  pass  with 
their  covered  feet — this  has  always  been 
patria. 

%  It  is  a  loss  never  to  have  lived  young  in 
countries  so  warm  that  a  child  is  allowed  to 
feel  the  grass  there  with  naked  feet.  For  the 
feet  also  ought  to  have  communication  with 
the  fields;  they  have  their  own  sensation  of 
flowers.  Even  as  all  the  senses  are  distinct 
and  different,  and  as  it  were  a  separate  con- 
ception of  the  mind,  so  also  are  the  sensibili- 
ties. They  are  not  merely  added  ways  of 
communion,  they  are  all  unique  ways.  To 
lack  the  sensibility  of  feet  that  might  have 

56 


been  acquainted  with  various  Nature,  but 
that  had  their  tenderness  touched  by  nothing 
save  dead  sand  at  the  seaside,  is  a  little  loss 
that  one  wishes  the  civilized  child  had  not  to 
undergo. 

XI.  DAILY  TIME 

Sfe  I  HAVE  asked  a  man  who  evidently  en- 
joyed his  mature  years  what  was  his  principal 
remembrance  of  childhood,  and  he  has  an- 
swered, without  stopping  to  find  something 
unexpected — as  the  man  of  the  moment  is  too 
apt  to  stop — "I  was  bored."  Too  much  time 
is  what  wearies  childhood.  Although  we  are 
all  surprised  by  the  speed  with  which,  in  after 
years,  "time  flies,"  as  we  all  say,  not  many  of 
us  understand  that  there  is  no  flying  nor  creep- 
ing on  the  part  of  Time;  that  his  space  is 
merely  relative,  and  that  he  seems  to  fly  now 
because  in  childhood  he  went  on  a  halting 
foot;  or  rather  because  he  too  was  small  and 
went  a  little  way  at  his  great  pace.  But  there 
is  no  other  manner  of  measuring  the  passage 
57  ^3  of 


of  time  than  such  an  act  of  comparison,  and 
those  who  do  not  make  it  consciously  must 
make  it  unconsciously.  The  childish  measure 
of  time,  moreover,  it  is  that  makes  ancient 
history  ancient.  If  we  heard  for  the  first 
time,  at  forty,  of  Cheops,  of  Abraham,  of  the 
Argonautic  Expedition,  of  Romulus,  of  Char- 
lemagne, their  respective  antiquity  in  our 
imagination  would  be  wonderfully  lessened. 
Not  childhood  only  but  infancy  itself — in- 
fancy sung  to  sleep — conceives  great  myste- 
ries of  time.  But  measure  the  centuries  by 
the  ten-years*  measuring  rod  of  later  life,  and 
see  what  little  things  they  are,  and  to  what 
small  purpose  even  four  or  five  of  them  are 
added  together.  Our  race's  sense  of  time,  and 
sense  of  history,  and  sense  of  mystery  is 
formed  of  the  impressions  of  its  successive 
childhoods. 

^  To  return  to  the  contemporary  but  differ- 
ing times  of  ourselves  and  our  children:  they 
are  not,  as  we  are  accustomed  to  life,  but  more 
influential  still  is  our  habit  of  memory  and 

58 


their  practice  of  oblivion.  They  do  not  make 
a  custom  of  remembering;  and  a  morning  not 
thought  upon  becomes  a  distant  thing  in  the 
afternoon;  last  year,  not  voluntarily  thought 
upon,  grows  dim;  whereas  ripe  age  pauses  to 
remember,  and  old  age  does  more  than  pause. 
"There  is  always  retrospect,"  said  an  old 
paper-seller  to  me  one  day;  he  had  stood  at 
the  same  corner  for  fifteen  short  though  weary 
years. 

*fe  Children,  then,  find  the  time  long. 
Wordsworth,  who  so  freshly,  so  observantly, 
remembered  childhood,  and  whose  childhood 
was  so  influential  in  our  literature,  character- 
istically remembered  the  length  of  childish 
time  as  a  length  of  happiness — the  length  of  a 
lovely  day  in  the  summer-country;  it  had  the 
length  of  twenty  days  of  summer-country  in 
older  age — albeit  older  age  that  in  him  loved 
the  summer  as  passionately  as,  in  him,  child- 
hood had  loved  it,  older  age  that  reluctantly 
saw  it  fly,  and  whispered  a  "Stay — thou  art 
so  fair,"  to  a  thousand  thousand  moments. 
59 


They  would  not  stay,  though  they  seemed  to 
have  lingered  at  long-drawn  play  over  the 
head  of  the  boy  he  remembered.  But  other 
men,  who  are  not  Wordsworths,  or  anything 
like  Wordsworths,  have  connected  the  slow 
time  of  childhood  with  other  things  than 
summer  loveliness  and  light.  "I  was  bored," 
said  the  cheerful  and  active  man  of  middle- 
age;  and  we  may  have  to  deal,  in  the  persons 
of  our  younglings,  with  the  childhood  of  per- 
sons who  are  not  Wordsworths — hard  as  this 
saying  may  be  in  the  parent's  ear. 
^  We  should  not  let  our  children  be  bored; 
they  may,  they  must,  be  weary  of  their  edu- 
cation; but  that  is  a  different  thing.  It  is 
an  occupied  fatigue,  an  active  distaste.  What 
is  to  be  avoided  is  ennui  and  the  vacant  hours. 
Our  fathers  guarded  them  against  this  aus- 
terely, by  means  of  duty  and  occupation, 
whether  a  child's  duty  or  a  schoolboy's ;  we — 
lessons  apart — are  attempting  that  guard  by 
means  of  amusement — whether  a  child's 
"fun"  or  a  schoolboy's.  Now,  it  is  with  no 
60 


sour  discountenance  that  we  may  question  this 
amusement.  The  world  has  tardily  decided 
that  if  anyone  ought  to  be  happy  it  is  a  child, 
the  sinless  one;  the  decision  is  made  with  a 
side-glance  at  the  more  completely  sinless  ani- 
mal, and  a  wish  that  this  creature  too  might 
have  the  justice  of  happiness.  And  this  is  a 
modern  resolution,  and  a  modern  wistf ulness ; 
it  does  not  imply,  as  it  would  seem  to  imply, 
a  "conviction  of  sin"  in  the  adult  heart;  it  is 
therefore  not  solemn,  but  it  is  very  kind  and 
just.  Not  in  condemnation  of  that  temper 
of  mind  is  the  inevitable  warning  to  be  urged. 
No,  the  evil  to  be  feared  is  not  that  of  making 
the  child  too  happy;  it  is  that  of  using  up  the 
capital  estate  of  pleasure.  If  a  child  is  to 
continue  happy,  to  continue  amused  and  gay, 
he  must  be  entertained  upon  the  usufruct  and 
not  upon  the  capital  of  pleasures.  Nay,  even 
elders,  considerate  enough  to  hold  that  chil- 
dren should  not  have  "fun"  too  unmixed,  lest 
it  should  lose  its  charm,  hardly  know  that  it 
is  the  very  fact  of  "fun"  that  is  in  danger. 
6 1 


The  child  over-amused  is  in  peril  of  losing 
amusement  itself  within  his  own  heart,  and 
not  merely  the  pleasure  in  pantomime,  or  the 
pleasure  in  roller-skating,  in  other  words  the 
need  of  a  change  of  gaieties.  Alas,  it  is 
gaiety  itself  that  is  at  stake.  The  man  who 
confessed  that  his  chief  remembrance  of  his 
childhood  was  that  he  had  been  bored,  had 
kept  his  gaiety  unimpaired  in  spite  of  that 
uncheerful  beginning.  It  would  have  been 
better  for  him,  and  more  just  to  his  innocence, 
if  he  had  not  been  bored,  but  it  was  better  for 
him  to  have  been  bored  during  the  incon- 
siderate occupations  of  his  elders  and  by  their 
dullness,  than  by  his  own  amusements.  That 
is,  better  of  two  evils.  Children  should  not 
be  bored  at  all,  or  not  more  than  is  human. 
*fc  Not  too  often,  not  too  long,  should  justly 
be  the  "fun."  As  to  its  length,  the  variations 
of  contemporary  time  should  teach  us  that  one 
hour  of  pantomime  is  to  the  average  young 
child  as  long  as  an  hour  of  sunny  summer  was 
to  Wordsworth — that  is  twenty  times  one  hour 
62 


— well,  Wordsworth  liked  round  numbers, 
and  I  hope  poets  will  continue  to  like  them; 
let  us  suppose  he  exaggerated  somewhat.  At 
any  rate  the  amused  child  lives  quickly 
through  a  long  hour,  as  the  bored  child  lives 
minutely  through  a  long  hour.  Assuredly 
what  we  owe  them  both  is  our  judgment  of 
their  different,  their  childish,  conditions;  and 
a  little  imagination  that  shall  take  their  meas- 
ure into  our  life-accustomed  hands,  and  with 
it  rule  the  measure  of  cyclic,  of  weekly,  of 
daily,  and  of  hourly  time. 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGOMLUMHVHOinV 


A     000025215     5 


